The Sourdough Wars (19 page)

Anita nodded. “I can, yes.”

“Sally wanted that starter no matter what. She saw it as her ticket to being a person of value. It was literally about that primitive. So she stole it from the cryogenics firm. She heard about the control starter, and it never occurred to her to look for it anywhere but the main warehouse. She didn’t have a subtle mind, but sometimes that worked in her favor. You don’t know this yet, but Tony Tosi stole the original starter—it’s been in his bread for two years.”

Anita nearly jumped out of her chair. “That bastard!”

“When he found out about the control, he bribed someone to tell him where it was and he tried to steal it too. However, the control had been moved back to the vault where the original starter was kept. Sally went unwittingly to the right place and got it.”

“But how could it help her? She was already baking the best bread in northern California—she couldn’t just mix it in like Tony Tosi did, for good luck or something. She thought she needed it for its publicity value. And she couldn’t have that if it was stolen.”

“She held it for ransom.” I stopped to watch her reaction. But she didn’t react. She just sat there, politely waiting for the professor to finish her lecture. So I finished. “She got you to agree to meet her on Friday, after she’d put her kid on the bus for San Francisco. You went to her bakery and she tried to extort an agreement to go into business with her.”

“That’s ridiculous. Why would I agree to such a thing? All I had to do was call the police.”

“Oh, I think you tried. But she ripped the phone out. Then she gave you a little demonstration—using lighter fluid and a ball of bread dough—to show you what she’d do to the starter if you left the bakery. She’d have plenty of time because the police would have to get a warrant to search for the starter. She’d simply burn it up before you got back.”

“This is too ridiculous. All I had to do was agree and—”

I finished for her: “And later say you’d been pressured into it and sue. But you didn’t think of it then. You picked up a bread knife and killed her with it.”

Anita didn’t miss a beat. “Prove it.”

I brought out the little piece of paper I’d typed up before Chris and I had left the office that afternoon. It said
For Immediate Release
at the top, and the date was February 14, the day Sally was killed. The text announced the partnership of Anita Ashton and Sally Devereaux in the Plaza Bakery of Sonoma.

“Rob got this in the mail this morning. She was a woman who took precautions.”

The tense shoulders sagged. Anita’s eyes and mouth and cheek muscles all came suddenly under the spell of the law of gravity. If I ever saw defeat, I saw it in that face.

“I need another drink,” she said, and walked to her desk to get the decanter. With one hand she picked it up, and with the other she opened the drawer of her desk. It came out with a gun.

“This is why I forgot I lent Sally my gun. You see, I have two. Now give me the paper.”

“It won’t matter if I do. Rob has a copy.”

“Give it to me.”

“What are you going to do? Shoot us here in your study? How are you going to explain that?”

“Just give me the paper.”

“Tell me something first, Anita. Was I right?”

Her eyes darted back and forth between Chris and me. “Did you two record this?”

“No. We didn’t even think of it.” Which shows how smart we were.

“Open your purses and empty them.”

I looked at Chris. She shrugged, picked up her purse, and upended it. I did the same. No recorders spilled out.

“Okay,” said Anita. “I killed her. It doesn’t matter if I tell you, because you aren’t going to be repeating it. And I’ll tell you something else. I’m sorry about it. Yes, she stole my starter, and yes, she tried to threaten me into going into her damned partnership. But, like you said, I identified with her. We were ‘friends’ if people like us—ambitious people, people to whom achievement is the most important thing in the world —ever really have any friends. I didn’t feel close to her, but I identified with her. I knew what she was like. Because I’m like that.”

I was so bowled over by this unexpected display of self-knowledge that I almost forgot our predicament. She’d gotten one thing wrong, though: I would have described Anita and Sally as people to whom the way other people saw them was what it was all about. She kept talking. “Sally killed Peter, and I killed Sally. Because we both wanted sourdough fame. Crazy, isn’t it?” She laughed. “It might be crazy, but that doesn’t stop me from wanting it. I’ve known for a long time what I am. Some people say I’m driven. You know how my ex-husband put it? He said I was driven by evil chauffeurs.” She laughed again. When we didn’t, she said, “I thought it was rather good. So I’m driven by evil chauffeurs. It’s just the way I am, that’s all. Maybe I could go get my head shrunk and I wouldn’t be, but if I did that, I’d be giving up a part of myself, wouldn’t I?”

Chris said, “People say they go to shrinks to find lost parts of themselves.”

“Listen to Little Miss Schoolmarm. I don’t know how Peter could stand you. I like what I am, do you understand that? I like being famous and making thousands of dollars for lectures and having everybody coming up afterward and acting like I’m some kind of guru or something. I love it. That’s fulfillment, ladies. Don’t let anybody kid you.”

“So why do you need to run a bakery?”

“Fame and money are the best things I’ve had so far, but they aren’t enough. Fulfillment and peace aren’t the same thing. The bakery would give me peace—exorcise my childhood demons. That’s what I need instead of some tweed-wearing shrink.”

“I don’t get it,” I said. “If you exorcise your demons, won’t you be giving up part of yourself? The evil chauffeurs you like so much?”

“Maybe. But I’ll do it my way.”

“It won’t work, Anita. Once you get it, it still won’t be enough. You’ll be just as empty as you are right now.”

“Shut up! Give me that paper.”

She took a step forward and I stepped backward. “You’ve got too much sense to shoot us. This is your house—how are you going to explain how we came to be dead on the broadloom?”

“That’s my problem. Give it to me, dammit.”

“No.” I stepped backward again and she took another step forward. Chris now had a clear path to the door, and she took it. She was out of the room before Anita could whirl around. When she finally turned, I attacked from behind—throwing my arms around her in what I believed to be a viselike, arm-paralyzing grip. She whapped me with one of the supposedly paralyzed arms, and, stunned, I fell backward, still holding on to her with one hand.

She whipped around to face me, and then we were both on the floor, struggling like two galoots in a western, rolling over and over, me trying to get the gun and she holding on to it, never getting it into shooting position. We knocked the fire screen away and rolled closer to the fireplace.

“Hold it, Anita,” said Chris. I was on the bottom, but I could see her standing in the doorway, pointing Sally’s gun. “Drop the gun,” she said. Anita dropped it.

“Now get up.”

Anita shifted her weight off my body, and then Chris yelled, “Roll, Rebecca. Your hair’s on fire!”

I smelled it just as she said it. I rolled, and as I did, I could see flame at the ends of my pageboy. I caught the hair in my hand and mashed it into the rug, rolling over on it, hoping I wasn’t just burning up the back of my neck. I didn’t feel anything, but I guess I was still on fire, because suddenly Chris fell on top of me, smothering the flames with a pillow. The smell was vile.

Anita recovered her balance and dived for the gun she’d dropped. Chris’s knee came up just as I sat up, hoping to get in Anita’s way. Bone crunched against bone—Chris’s kneecap and my jaw—and I lay back down rather hard.

There was nothing to do but shoot, so Chris did. Or, rather, she tried to. She hadn’t taken the safety off Sally’s gun, or maybe it wasn’t even loaded—I couldn’t tell at the time. All I know is there was a very anticlimatic little click. And then Anita jumped on both of us again and all three of us were rolling.

My hip landed on something hard, and then it was under the small of my back, digging in and nearly killing me. “Ow,” I yelped, and reached down to grab it. It was the gun, of course, and if I hadn’t yelled, I would have been the first one under my back, but I’d alerted the enemy and her hand got there first. She pulled at it, and I rolled off the gun toward her, hoping to knock her off-balance, but the gun went off. I stopped in midroll. The bullet had only gone through one of Anita’s nice walls, but the noise had frozen Chris as well as me. That gave Anita the split second she needed. She was in control again, the gun pointed at both of us.

She got up warily, first on one knee, watching us like a mongoose watching two cobras. “Stay where you are,” she said, and sat on the edge of her desk, catching her breath. We stayed.

“Rebecca,” she said at last. “Don’t bother giving me that paper. Pick it up and throw it in the fire.”

The paper was crumpled on the floor. I didn’t move. The gun went off again and I could have sworn I felt the bullet whizzing past my cheek, but it sank into the wall about two feet to my left, so I guess my imagination was working overtime. However, I took her meaning.

“Say no more,” I said, and threw the paper into the fire, wondering why I’d been so stubborn about it in the first place. “Now stand up. Both of you.”

We did.

“Chris, kick that gun over here.” She meant Sally’s, and Chris kicked it. In one graceful movement, Anita picked it up. Keeping the other gun trained on us, she locked Sally’s in her desk drawer. “And now let’s take a little ride. Put on your coats, ladies.”

We had shrugged them off when we sat down, and now we plucked them out of our respective chairs and put them on.

“Now gather up the stuff you dumped out of your handbags and put it back in them.”

Like a couple of robots, we complied. I hated the feeling of helplessness that had settled on me when she fired the gun, but I told myself that maybe one of the neighbors had heard it and would call the police. Then I realized that the neighbors couldn’t have heard anything. For one thing, they were too far away. For another, there was a dull roar above the fire’s mild one. It was raining. I hadn’t noticed the rain when it started, but then, the evening’s entertainment had been engrossing.

When our purses were stuffed, Anita told us to go upstairs ahead of her, then walk down the wooden steps to our car. She was right behind us.

By the time we got to the bottom we were drenched. “Now get out your key, Rebecca, and unlock your side of the car. Then come back and unlock the passenger side.”

I did both things, and when I turned around, I lunged for her eyes with my key. She hit me on the side of the face with the gun. I was knocked backward, and Chris went for her. But Anita had time to compose herself and she gave Chris a more authoritative whap than I’d gotten. She went down.

Anita was hardly fazed. The term
cool customer
didn’t even apply; she was a frozen yogurt. She grabbed me by the arm and put the gun to my temple. “Get up,” she said to Chris. “And get in the backseat.”

Chris got in, tears running down her face. I think she was catching on that Anita was playing hardball. And so was I, but I didn’t know what to do about it. I didn’t want to die, which was clearly what Anita had in mind, and I thought of pleading for my life and Chris’s. I could tell her it was all okay—we wouldn’t go to the police; we’d never tell anyone that she’d killed Sally; and she could have her damned bakery and see if it made her happy. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Besides, I knew it wouldn’t work. A frozen yogurt who’d killed once would do it again—twice more.

I watched Chris get in the backseat, and then Anita let me go and trained the gun on Chris as she climbed into the passenger seat. “Now get in, Rebecca.”

What if I didn’t? What if I made a dash for it and ran for the nearest neighbor’s house? Would she really kill Chris? She’d certainly fry for it if she did. Could she be that dumb? I decided it wasn’t a matter of dumbness. She might panic, or she might just do it out of orneriness. I couldn’t take the chance. So I got in the Volvo.

It was freezing in there and we were dripping all over everything. I turned on the motor and the heater. “Let’s go,” said Anita.

“It has to warm up or it won’t run.” While it warmed up, I tried to think of what to do next, but my mind just wouldn’t work. The whap on the face had put me on overload or something. I tried to think of the proper computer term for the phenomenon, and then realized I wasn’t concentrating on the real problem. But concentrating had gotten me nowhere, so I tried not to think at all—just let the system relax for a bit.

Finally, Anita ordered me to start the car and go down the hill. I did.

Then she had me turn right and go up a hill, then go back down it and turn left and go up another hill. I couldn’t figure what in the name of Clarence Darrow she was doing. I could hardly see anything in the rain, and there was fog, too, but at least there wasn’t much traffic on those curly Marin roads.

The way that part of the county is set up, everybody lives on a hill. You have to wind up and then down, and who knows what else, to find your house—and heaven help you if you’re drunk. I’d grown up in these hills—or their cousins in San Rafael—and I had no desire to live in them. Give me a nice well-lighted city street.

As we wound back and forth, up one hill and down another, I began to get the glimmerings of an idea. If we ran into a car, I could put it into action. A couple of minutes later, one came at us.

I hit my horn. The car swerved, hit the side of the hill, and nearly skidded into us. It was close enough to see who the driver was, and the minute I did, I hit the gas. I’d meant to stop, having summoned help in a crude way, but I hadn’t thought the plan out any further than that. I guess I’d counted on some furious driver coming at us, all irate and full of bluster, mad enough to take on a killer with a gun. But the person in the other car was a terrified teenage girl who looked as if she’d passed her driver’s test yesterday. I didn’t want to take a chance on what Anita might do. As it was, her reaction was bad enough. She pistol-whipped Chris again. Chris slammed into the back of the seat with a whimper and a thunk and I cursed myself, overcome with guilt and fear.